Saying Goodbye to Books

(but not reading).

Samwell Tarley depicted in the Library of the Citadel

Across the years, I’ve written about writing, and I’ve written about reading. When people ask me how I will keep busy when I retire someday, I always answer the same— “There are so many books to read.” I don’t have a huge library, maybe 400 books total. I’ve given away as many as that over time, as presents and as load lighteners. I’d say The Kitten has at least a thousand, she being (as we’ve discussed) better read and educated than I. But I moved 13 times with my books and she’s been bedded down here for a good long while, plus a number of her books came to her from across the farm when her mother died.

When her mother died and we needed to figure out what was to be done with her books, I began to think of my allotted three-score and ten, and what a logistical nightmare I would leave behind to my heirs (or the three guys and a dumpster). I don’t like buying paperbacks, generally, but I have a few. Most of my books are weighty hardbacks, and even as I have cut back on my book buying in the last few years, the ones I do buy tend to be hardback.

We have a bed that with a push of a button will raise the feet or the head as desired, which is a great thing when one wants to read in bed—which I do want. At night however, this arrangement is frustrated by a lack of overhead light in our bedroom. One must abide by the two candlestick lamps on the table behind the bed, which when one uses the recline feature, tends to blot out a good deal of the reading light. And I like a lot of light when I read. So I am forced to have the bed flat and prop myself on my side to make use of the available light.

I think you can see where I’m going with this. I don’t want to burden anyone else with having to process what could be several hundred additional books that I’ll likely acquire in the next few decades, and I need my reading to be illuminated, preferably whilst propped up in the buff Tempurpedic. The other day while listening to the Commentary Podcast, host John Podhoretz revealed that he reads in bed with a Kindle so that he can manipulate the font. I have a tablet. I have the Kindle app. I need large, lit from behind font. I need to read in bed. I need not buy so many hardcover books. I need to use my Kindle/Tablet mashup.

I recently purchased the book “Sarum: The Novel of England” in hardback form, and it is a real paperweight. Needing reading material for our trip to Maine last month, I schlepped it along with me (along with the tablet), which while not a mistake (I enjoyed the read), did constitute a logistics flaw. I’ve continued to read the book (finished it two nights ago) propped up in my poorly lit bed. We have another volume just like it, The Collected Works of Jane Austen that I like to read to Catherine sometimes, and it takes up considerable bed/beside room. Since my Tablet is always near me in bed (to listen to Calm.Com sleep stories—the best!) my recent decision to go totally eBook will remove large impediments that often festoon the bed (bothering both occupants and the cat), but will give me better options to serenade my sweetie off to sleep with the words of Jane Austen in her ears.

The Crawlspace

Our house has a small basement underneath the kitchen and a crawlspace extending throughout the rest of the footprint, including stuff we added in the Great Renovation of 2011. My introduction to its horrors came a dozen or so years ago when I decided the DSL speed we were getting for internet could be increased by bringing in cable internet and then distributing it with ethernet cable throughout the house. To say I am not handy is an understatement, but I am determined. And so I bought a bunch of Cat 6 cable and some routers and distributed a workable high(er) speed internet in my house, a system I replaced within a year with a passable Wi-Fi net that has been improved upon ever since. I bring this up because in the course of laying the fiber and drilling holes etc., I came to be closely acquainted with the crawlspace. It is not a nice place. It is dry (thank God) mostly, and where it isn’t, there are sump pumps. But it is dark and dusty and dank, and a full day sliding around on a mechanic’s cart on my belly and back down there running cable created some sort of respiratory ague that lasted two days.

I have not willingly entered it since. I have—under pressure from Homestead Management—made short trips in to check on sump pumps making odd noises, but these have been under the duress of potential banishment.

Yet someone has to go down there now and again. Yesterday, I noticed what smelled to me like the odor of a dead animal. I have a terrible sense of smell, so when something makes it through the filters, there is clearly a smell worth investigating. Such is country life. Last year around this time, the same smell came up through into the same space (my sleeping quarters, natch), and I contracted the handyman we share with others on our peninsula with a special bounty for crawlspace entry. He located a varmint that had worked its way in but apparently could not work its way out, and everyone was happy. So not wanting to screw up a good thing, I sent the following text to him this morning: “I suspect the sweet smell in my bedroom may be coming from a dead varmint in the crawl underneath. I'd like to offer a standard bounty to you or one of your men to investigate/mitigate. Any takers?” He answered “I’ll have a guy over in ten minutes.” And he did.

His man showed up ready to go, and he spent twenty minutes moving about the space on the mechanics cart not only searching for desiccating squirrel, rabbit, or (dear Lord help us) rat meat, but video-taping it on his phone for my inspection when he exited. No varmint was found, and the mystery smell remains a mystery. I gave him the standard bounty and he was on his way.

I will not share the sum with you here, and there are two reasons. First, I don’t want to perturb what may be a fragile local market for crawlspace diving. And second, I probably would have paid double if requested. I hate crawlspace diving with the heat of 10,000 suns, although I am likely mistaken (lulled by my sense of personal grandiosity), I figured that at this point in my life, I can afford to avoid it.

The Debate

I would like to vote for a GOP candidate for President in 2024, but the Party and its members are making it increasingly difficult. I’ve already decided only to vote for a candidate who is committed to Ukraine’s victory over Russia, so that removes what appears to be the top 3 poll positions, including the favorite, for whom I would not vote under any circumstance.

Hurrying home from an evening of bar-trivia in nearby St. Michaels, I was admittedly enthusiastic about tuning in, as I wanted to hear what the candidates had to say and how they handled themselves. I want to vote FOR someone this time, not AGAINST someone as I have in the two previous elections.

I spent 18 minutes in front of the TV and then turned it off. Not because of the candidates, but because of the audience. I cannot stand debates being conducted along the lines of a UFC match, and let’s face it—primary voters are a “special” brand to begin with—so if you’re showing up at a debate fifteen months before the election and seven months before the first primary, you’re probably not there to be informed so much as you are there to hoot and patoot for your chosen candidate. I made a comment along these lines on Twitter yesterday (yes, Twitter), and my friend the great Gary Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) piped up with the perfect comment:

Civic character. That’s exactly it. We are a nation of boors, left and right. We have lost our poise, our respect, and in some cases, our humanity. Worse yet, poise, respect, and humanity have come to be viewed as weakness. I love America but am increasingly dubious about Americans.

How about this—and I realize I’m talking crazy here. How about we let Trump, DeSantis, and Rama-smarmy split the Nationalist/Populist vote, and everyone else line up behind someone else (essentially Trump’s 2016 strategy when Trumpism was not mainstream in the GOP) ? I’ve been open to Christie, Haley, and Scott, mostly because they start with more recognition than the remaining candidates, but based on the little I saw of the debate the other night and the voluminous reading and listening I’ve done utilizing trusted channels since, I’d like to recommend Nikki Haley. Don’t get me wrong. She’s not perfect. She’s gets it profoundly wrong on Congressional earmarks in the budget process for instance (she doesn’t like them, I don’t like the formal appropriating that goes on and spends 99% of the money). Plus, I’m tired of looking for perfect. We need someone who is “good enough”, and if the re-alignment of the GOP has gone as far as many think it has toward neo-FDR’ism and personality cultism, maybe the “anti-establishment” candidate is someone who swims in a different lane than that?

In the running for my best tweet of all time

I don’t know how all this ends, but I’m less hopeful now than I can ever remember being.